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Saturday, 22 October 2022

Two More Leaves of the MdM and AdM Hours


In May I wrote a blogpost about two leaves from a Book of Hours which has the initials "MdM" and "AdM" -- presumably of its husband and wife owners -- in the borders; they are at Montreal and Rochester, NY. By chance I found another leaf from the same manuscript while in the US in July, in Toledo, Ohio, and wrote another blogpost about them after my return. In the second of these posts I reproduced a page from a 1923 Maggs Bros catalogue, in which four leaves of the manuscript are described, including the Toledo one. 

I have now found two more leaves, at least one of which is described in the Maggs catalogue. The two new leaves do not have the telltale initials "MdM" and "AdM" in their borders, but I am confident -- based on the style of script and decoration, and the number of lines per page -- that they come from the same manuscript.

Both of the newly-recognised leaves are at the Princeton University Art Museum. I saw and photographed them in 2015, and since then they have been put on the Museum's website. One has a small miniature of a black-clad abbot (he holds a crozier, but does not wear a mitre, so is not a bishop), identified as St Benedict in the adjacent blue rubric (or, as Elizabeth Moodey once suggested to me that they should be called, "bluebric"). A detail is show above; here is the full page:

Princeton, Art Museum (inv. no. y147) [Source]

It was the border decoration incorporating gold circles/ovals that first made me realise that this is from the same manuscript as the "MdM" and "AdM" hours: they are unusual, and reminiscent of those on the leaf at Toledo:

Here is the verso of the first Princeton leaf. Although the details are different, there is a generic resemblance in its unusually dark background colour to that of the leaf in Montreal:

Princeton

McGill University, Montreal

The St Benedict leaf at Princeton is doubtless identical with one of those described in the 1923 Maggs catalogue, "with a fine miniature, in gold and colours, of St. Benedict":

The second leaf at Princeton does not have a miniature, but it has other points of interest:

Princeton, Art Museum (inv. no. y148) [Source]

The text comprises the first four prayers in an unusual series that begins "O suavitas et requies corporum et animarum nostrarum Ihesu Christe ...". [1]

In the lower border is a scroll with text that appears to read "LE CECOURS DE MARIE. LA":
It is apparent that the text has been tampered with, however; this is especially clear where the word "DE" seems to be followed by a letter "S":
The colour of the ink of "MARIE" also looks different. This is visible in the professional Princeton image, but clearer in my own amateur photo, where we can see that MARIE is in gold:
Erased letters are more-or-less visible under the "MARIE". If we look at the reverse of the leaf, enhance the image, and flip it horizontally so that the writing is no longer back-to-front, we can see that the text perhaps originally read "S. K[A]THERINE":
I don't know what the "LA" at the end means, and I do not know why St Catherine might deserve this emphasis; she was presumably not the name-saint of the original patron, if her initials were MdM or AdM. But I am optimistic that more leaves from the manuscript will surface in due course, and will provide more evidence for the resolution of this and other puzzles ... [2]

[EDIT, 23 October 2022]
In response to Bill Stoneman's comment below, here is an image of the verso of the second Princeton leaf, with a vertical catchword:

As I am providing an update to the blogpost, I may as well rectify an oversight. I visited Rochester knowing that they had one leaf, as it was on their website. But when I got there, I found that in fact they have a second one as well, also with "AdM" in the border on the recto, but which I forgot to mention above:






Notes
[1] Googling suggests this is rather rare; it occurs in the Holford Hours at the Gulbenkian Foundation (see below); in a late 15th-century Book of Hours now in Münster, and a 15th/16th-century prayerbook in Udine (Archivio Storico Diocesano, MS 677), but the series also appears printed among the works of Giles of Rome (d. 1316) [Wikipedia]. 

The introductory rubric and incipits of the series of 15 prayers in the Gulbenkian manuscript are listed as follows:

[2] I have avoided addressing one puzzle above. After reading my previous blogpost, Kerry Schauber of the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester (who looked after me with great kindness when I visited in July), got in touch with a query. She pointed out something that I had overlooked: the Maggs catalogue records the dimensions as 6½ × 4½ inches while the Rochester (and Toledo) leaves are about 8 × 5½ inches. (And the Princeton website gives the dimensions of their leaves as as 7¹⁵/₁₆ × 5½ inches). I think the answer must lie in the wording of the Maggs descriptions: each entry refers in its bold heading to a "MAGNIFICENT BROAD BORDER" rather than to a leaf: I suspect that they are recording the dimensions of the border, not of the full leaf.


1 comment:

  1. As always very interesting and intriguing. Do you have an image of the other side of the second Princeton leaf? I am hoping we might be able to determine whether the scroll which ends in "LA" was actually a verso in the bound volume and might be continued on another scroll on the recto of the following leaf.

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